Benjamin A. Elman's A Cultural History of Modern Science in China is useful and stimulating addition to contemporary literature on modern Chinese history. It provides an accessible, scholarly overview of a topic that has been marginalized in much modern Western writing on China, which has tended to focus upon political and economic issues. As Elman points out at the beginning of this book, 'if there has been one constant in China since the middle of the nineteenth century' it has been that succeeding regimes, whatever their political character, 'have all made science and technology a top priority' (p. 1). The cultural history of modern science, medicine and technology in China is, Elman argues, too important to be restricted to specialists. Not least of reasons for bringing the history of science and technology back from the margins is the high profile given to scientific and technological progress by the modern People's Republic. If we are to understand China, Elman argues, we must understand the place of science in the modern Chinese worldview.

Three unifying themes drive Elman's argument. First, that the passivity of China as a recipient of Western knowledge has been exaggerated: Elman shows how the interaction between China and the West in matters of scientific knowledge was much more of a two-way process than has been appreciated in Western historiography. Second, and to some extent modifying the first, is the point that China has accepted and appropriated Western knowledge on its own terms and for its own purposes. Third, Elman argues that the Asian perspective on the meaning and significance of 'natural studies' has been ignored in Western historiography, and thus that the true meanings and importance of the ways in which Western and Eastern scientific traditions interacted in China has been, at best, only half-understood.

All these approaches -- which were worked through in depth in Elman's earlier On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (2005) -- have their difficulties, but they offer important correctives to the established interpretations of science in modern Chinese history.

Two chapters of Modern Science in China -- the first and the fourth -- look at Christian missionaries as agents of Western scientific ideas in China, and in doing so the complex interactions and appropriations that characterized the process through which those ideas were disseminated is placed at the heart of the analysis. The first chapter is concerned with the role of the Jesuit order in bringing the learning of Europe to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The intellectual elites of Ming and Qing China, for whom Elman uses the word 'literati', connected their own search for meaningful structures of morality and knowledge with the studies brought to them from the West by the Jesuits. The role of astronomy played a key role, with Chinese courts using Western astronomical knowledge to inform their own vital calendrical calculations. The openness of Chinese elites, both intellectual and political, to Western science -- albeit always on their own terms -- is a theme Elman stresses, emphasizing the 'longstanding and commensurable interests in natural phenomena' (p. 25) of the Chinese literati and noting also that the arrival of the Jesuit missions followed from a period of domestic scientific revival, with which Western scientific innovations could be aligned. Elman traces the interaction between missionaries and the Chinese in astronomy, mathematics, geometry and cartography, each side transforming and using concepts and ideas from the other for its own purposes. This period of interaction came to an end in the early eighteenth century with the decline of the power of the Jesuits and the banning of missionary work in China by the Kangxi emperor. In the fourth chapter it is the role of Protestant missionaries in disseminating Western scientific knowledge in China in the mid-nineteenth century which is the central theme. Following the failure of diplomatic efforts such as the Macartney mission of 1793 to open China to trade, a new openness was forced upon China through defeat in the First Opium War of 1839-42. A partial acceptance of foreign missionaries in China was one of the consequences of that war, and the translations and publications of Protestant missionary societies played an important role in spreading Western scientific and technological developments within China, perhaps most notably in medicine, where the English missionary doctor Benjamin Hobson produced influential translations of Western medical works, as well as other scientific texts intended to educate Chinese students along the lines of the 'natural theology' favoured by many Protestant churches, in which man's works are seen as harmonious expressions of God's intentions. Not the least of the consequences of the missions' activities, Elman, notes, was that new scientific and technical disciplines became acceptable as careers for some levels of the Chinese literati. This emphasis on not only technical but also social and cultural factors in the spread of Western scientific concepts is characteristic of Elman's analysis throughout.

The pragmatic uses to which Chinese elites wished to put Western science and technology represent an element of convergence between Eastern and Western sciences, but Elman stresses that the story is at least as much one of a divergence of scientific cultures. The second chapter discusses the ways in which the Chinese looked increasingly inward and to their own past during the eighteenth century in order to recover classical knowledge in science, mathematics and medicine, while European scholars 'went beyond their ancient masters to make significant breakthroughs during this era' (p. 37), breakthroughs such as calculus and Newtonian mechanics that were not replicated in China. Strong interests in scientific, mathematical and other forms of knowledge continued uninterrupted in eighteenth-century China, but the overall impression given by Elman as he discusses geometry, medicine and other areas of knowledge during this period is of a culture content to confirm and make use of what it knows rather than seeking the expansion of knowledge in itself. The political culture of China encouraged those disciplines that were of direct value to the authorities in exercising power in accordance with 'the mandate of heaven': mathematics and astronomy, used to underpin calendrical practice, provided the clearest instance of knowledge used in this virtuous way, and accordingly these areas of study were accepted as constituting 'a collateral branch of classical learning' (p. 66). This theme of the uses of scientific knowledge in China being focused above all on the immediately useful, and on that which was useful to those in power, is one which runs through the modern history of science in China to the present day.

The intellectual tools through which things could be done -- the provision of luxury goods, the improvement of particular manufacturing techniques, the acquisition of Western weapons, the treatment of particular medical conditions -- were welcome in China to varying degrees and provided a ready route for the dissemination of Western science and technology. The tools of innovation and invention found no such welcome. This becomes clear in Elman's discussion of manufacturing and trade in imperial China in chapter three, which addresses the problem of why, when a porcelain-manufacturing industry on a vast scale already existed, mass production did not make an appearance in China until the late nineteenth century. The implication is that the culture of precision which was firmly established in eighteenth-century European enterprises never became established in China. The Chinese greatly valued clocks and watches, and foreign clockmakers flourished in China serving the market for timepieces as gifts, novelties and luxury items, but Qing China never saw precision in timekeeping and measurement as a key to economic and industrial advances. The timepiece used by Captain James Cook on his second voyage of 1772, observes Elman, 'was not an idle curiosity (as clocks were in China), but a byproduct of Newtonian mechanics and calculus, which had linked time and space to map movement' (p. 72). The analytical style of mathematical reasoning that underlay such a development was absent in China. Other factors played a role in limiting the development of large-scale manufacturing in China: there was little incentive, for example, to modernize the domestic porcelain industry once Europeans had obtained the secrets of porcelain manufacture and the centres of world production (and trade) had moved to places outside China's borders. Elman notes, however, that developments in the Chinese book printing and publishing industries during the eighteenth century played an important part in readying the country for the renewed spread of Western scientific ideas in the nineteenth century.

The three latter chapters carry the story of science in China to the early twentieth century, looking at the dissemination of Western science through textbooks (chapter five), the significance of military installations -- arsenals and dockyards -- as places of innovation, manufacture and technical education (chapter six), and the final displacement of traditional Chinese science and medicine by their Western counterparts (chapter seven). In these chapters the same themes of the resilience (and flexibility) of traditional Chinese intellectual traditions, the active participation of China in the processes through which Western science was accepted, and the overwhelmingly pragmatic view of the Chinese, are present, but are overshadowed by the ideological re-alignment of Chinese elites towards Western models of science and technology -- a re-alignment reflecting military, political and cultural influences and objectives. In particular, the increasing disenchantment of the burgeoning Chinese professional and merchant classes, exposed to Western ideas, with their established political systems and elites, found partial expression through an espousal of Western approaches to solving problems both practical and theoretical.

Elman's book is certainly a masterly synthesis of a very large topic. It brings new elements to the story in its emphasis on the dynamic role China has played in shaping its relationship with Western science and technology. Yet in the end his analysis does not satisfy, for it leaves the fundamental questions unanswered. He does not ultimately explain, for example, why the key element of innovation is lacking in China. The much-vaunted Chinese economic miracle is based ultimately on recycling, copying, and providing skilled manual labour to assemble other people's products more quickly. Nothing new comes from China, only more affordable versions of technologies other people have mastered and now want to have as cheaply and abundantly as possible.

One of the fundamental themes of Chinese history, addressed (but never really solved) in Needham's magisterial mid-twentieth century history of Chinese science, was why scientific and technical innovation stopped in China around the seventeenth century and never truly resumed. For centuries world-changing inventions came from China, but, for the last five hundred years, nothing: the traffic has all been in the other direction. Benjamin Elman's book does not answer that problem either, but in a similar way to his earlier work, On Their Own Terms, he manages to avoid the problem by turning it inside out. Instead of asking why innovation in China ceased and the country has had to import ideas and technology from the West over since, he makes that story of second-hand science his central narrative and re-interprets it to appear to be a story of Chinese enterprise and initiative that Western historians have unaccountably neglected.

Modern China's commitment to technology is overwhelmingly pragmatic in nature. Little basic research goes on in Chinese institutions, and little that is original is created there. For modern China, technological development has overwhelmingly been a matter of borrowing, copying and stealing the ideas of others. The vital element missing from the history of modern science in China is innovation: nothing in Elman's history changes that.

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